Inside LabourStart

The contest begins.   Publicized to our English list and our Facebook group (via email), to Twitter and UnionBook.  Let’s hope for another great competition and thanks to Derek for the hard work he’s done and will do on this.

Two participants at our recent conference in Washington asked for a short text they could circulate making the case for people becoming LabourStart correspondents.  Here’s what I’ve written today — feel free to use as is, or modify, and circulate.

Why become a LabourStart correspondent

LabourStart, the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement, publishes links to some 90,000 union news stories every year.

Those links are added to LabourStart’s database by a network of nearly 700 volunteer correspondents who monitor union websites as well as mainstream news sources and identify union news stories.

In addition to appearing on LabourStart’s website (including the brand new US Edition at http://www.laborstart.us), many of those stories appear on union websites around the world, as LabourStart syndicates its news.  Over 200 union websites in the USA take the LabourStart news service, as do 560 other unions around the globe.

To ensure that news from your union — at national, regional or even local level — makes it to LabourStart, you should consider becoming a volunteer correspondent.

It’s easy to sign up – just fill in the form at http://www.labourstart.org/newcorrespondents.shtml

No Sweat Apparel which has long been a LabourStart partner is attempting to liquidate stock.  They have a quantity of logo-free t-shirts made from organic cotton, produced by union members in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.  They’re offering these for sale at $5 each and I’ve asked them how many they have, as I would consider buying the whole lot for LabourStart and then selling them.  I’ll let you know what happens next.

Update 3.9: They’ll get back to us after their sale to let us know what’s available.  I was thinking of taking the logo-free t-shirts and having our logo printed on them after we’ve gotten them.

The following may be of some use to you in gaining the support of your union (locally, regionally or nationally) for LabourStart. I was asked to draft it for a Union here in Canada and thought it might be (a) helpful, and (b) a trigger to some of us formally asking our Unions to support our work here on LabourStart.

If you do use it it would be great to hear back from you on the results.  It has been drafted using the traditional form for such things, but can be easily converted into plain language if your Union allows or preferrs a more accessible format for motions.

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Whereas we live and work in a globalized world defined by corporations and not by working people;

And Whereas global solidarityis more important now than it has ever been in the history of our Union,

And Whereas LabourStart.org works to connect and inform workers the world over about all our struggles,

And Whereas while we have many experiences we can share with our sisters and brothers around the world, we also have a great deal to learn from others as we all face the same threats to the existence of good, secure, healthy jobs;

And Whereas LabourStart works, without regard to national borders, union affiliation or sector of employment to build global solidarity between workers and to assist them in their struggles by mobilizing workers around the world,

Be It Therefore Resolved That our Union place a link to LabourStart on our website.

Be It Further Resolved That our Union’s website carry the relevant LabourStart newswires

Be It Further Resolved That our Union designate a member or staff person as our LabourStart Correspondent to ensure that news from and about our Union reaches the world.

And Be It Finally Resolved That our Union donate the sum of ________ to LabourStart to allow it to continue its work.

I’ve just written to several people following up on the discussion we had in Washington.  Basically here are the issues I raised:

1. Databases

I see that Chris Garlock has set up two online databases using Dabble for both labour films and film festivals.  If he’s happy with these, I think he should continue to maintain them (perhaps with some volunteer help) but that LabourStart should promote them.  We would do so with permanent links on our main pages and on labourstart.tv, as well as our usual channels (email, Twitter, Facebook, UnionBook).

The databases are here:

Films – https://laborfilms.dabbledb.com/page/laborfilms/ePjMknLk

Festivals – https://laborfilms.dabbledb.com/page/laborfilms/oohjaYNX

2. Labour films channel on YouTube

Does one exist?  Should we create one?  This could be branded by LabourStart or co-branded with DC Labor Council, IMF, ITF, or others.

3. Labour video/film of the year

LabourStart can do this competition and model it on the labour photo competition.  We would begin in November and aim to complete it by year’s end.  Readers would nominate films, a panel of judges would create a shortlist, readers would then vote, and we’d aim to have the winner shown at major union events such as the ITUC world congress in Vancouver in 2010.

Presumably we’d have to limit entries to films which are viewable online, so that everyone can see them.

I look forward to reading your suggestions and to working with you on this exciting project.

With over 80 items on my LabourStart and UnionBook to-do lists, I’m trying to do as many as possible this week and today will list them as I cross them off the list.  As a result, this entry will cover a number of different areas.  Here goes:

• Hindi & Bengali editions: Sent the file to Mahesh that needs to be translated in order to launch these.
• Recruiting new correspondents: Wrote to all 2,000 members of our Facebook group inviting them to sign up.
• Radio LabourStart: Wrote to Derek about relaunching this using podcasts.
• Work with ILCA: Wrote to Mariya Strauss about ways we can work together, including participation in each others’ conferences and ILCA members becoming LabourStart correspondents.
• Portuguese edition: Wrote to our 4 correspondents (2 in Brazil, 2 in Portugal) asking for their help to revive this and to recruit new correspondents.
• Multilingual campaigns: Wrote to our translators in Spanish, Dutch and Italian to ask for their preferred logins so that they can update campaigns directly without emailing me.   This will speed up campaign launches.

Considering that it’s August, a gain of 266 new followers on Twitter in the last few days is excellent news — it’s a more than 20% increase.  We’ll remind people of this from time to time, and in the fall should see further increases.  If we pick up another 350 followers, we’ll have overtaken even the AFL-CIO, which appears to be the most popular of the union Twitterers (though I haven’t done an exhaustive investigation).

Oh, and we’re no longer in the top 35,000 Twitterers — we’re now in the top 28,000, having jumped over 7,000 others in the last few days.  To make the top 1,000 Twitterers we’d need about 43,000 followers, so that’s not going to happen any time soon.  And to put things in perspective, there are already 99 Twitterers with a million followers or more apiece.

LabourStart’s UK news page — which was actually the very first one we created, a decade ago — has been relaunched on the model of the Australian, Canadian and US pages, and can be reached at any of the following URLs:

• http://www.labourstart.org.uk
• http://www.labourstart.org/uk
• http://uk.labourstart.org

In addition, I’ve fixed this and the other three editions to include a fairly prominent link back to global labour news (http://www.labourstart.org).

LabourStart senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk (Netherlands) often comes up with the coolest tools.  He found Twitter for us, for example.  More recently, he strongly recommended that we check out Posterous.  I’ve had some time today to check this out and can see that even with the first few steps, we’ve got a solution to several problems.

Here’s what I’ve done:

1. I added the Posterous email address to our English language mailing list.  (That took about a second.)
2. Then I sent out three test messages to Posterous by email – including our two most recent posts to our mailing list.
3. All 3 were automatically posted to our LabourStart Posterous web page, which means that this becomes an easy-to-find repository of our mailings, both for archival use and for our translators.
4. In addition, all 3 were automatically routed as Tweets — initially to my own Twitter account, but in future, to LabourStart’s.

We have the potential to do more — such as posting to Facebook, Flickr, blogs, etc.

At the moment, there’s no additional work needed — every mass mailing we do from now on gets routed through Posterous, appears on our blog there, and is Tweeted.

The good news first:  In the last 24 hours, we picked up 220 new followers to our Twitter feed thanks to our mass mailing.  This is a fairly low response (220 out of 58,000), but many of our readers don’t use Twitter, or have already become followers, and it is, after all, August.  Overall our follower base grew by nearly 20% in one day, which is great.

The bad news: The service feeding our new information to Twitter (Twitterfeed) seems to be erratic.  We’ll need to look into why it doesn’t always update in real time.  We may need to consider going manual for a while.